


everyone knows you can't let it go

by moonsandstar_s



Category: RWBY
Genre: F/F, not really blake/ilia but more a jump-off the eighth episode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-14 02:31:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12997878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonsandstar_s/pseuds/moonsandstar_s
Summary: Sixteen minutes and forty-one seconds ago, she turned her back on love. Sixteen minutes since, she's fled from her own heart, lying like an open wound between her and Blake. Fifteen ago, she ran here, a howling speed that echoes down to the base of her spine.Now Ilia counts the distance between then and now in terms of the moonlight's slanted silver across the floor: her heart will be blacker than Blake's eyes when she's through with her.





	everyone knows you can't let it go

**Author's Note:**

> This is for Naomi, best wife & best encourager, also a huge fan of anything Ilia in general. I love you so much. Merry Christmas! 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoy because this was HELL to write wtf

_I am Ilia Amitola. I am a soldier._  
  
That doesn’t ring true in her mind. Irritated, she has another go at it from a different angle.

_I am. I am Ilia Amitola, I am a -_

She thinks for a moment, strips away the lie and replaces it.  
  
_I am Ilia Amitola. And I am a goddamned coward._  
  
There, that’s better.  
  
By now, it’s midnight, and the ambush of the Belladonna manor is well underway. She would be surprised if Kali hasn’t already fallen, if Ghira isn’t the next to go. This isn’t a pleasant task and she wills it to be over as soon as possible. The memories of the Belladonna parents - Kali’s unwavering optimism, Ghira’s quiet strength - are stifling her with their proximity, and she’s already choking on guilt at the idea that she’s the orchestrator of their demises. They once fought on the same side. But now -  
  
Breathing shakily, Ilia dons her mask and closes her eyes, closing her eyes on the vision of the world seen through two slits. In the makeshift dark she seeks out her center of gravity, her tether to certainty, but it’s inexplicably gone, replaced by a yawning hollowness in her chest that induces the worst kind of nausea in her stomach. Beneath her feet, the balcony railing shifts warningly, the squeak a bare breath of noise in her controlled quiet. In the distance, she can hear pistol shots, shrieking, the shattering of the world as she knows it, but she remains aloft in her bubble of temporary peace. Temporary because she knows Yuma is out there, waiting to strike down the Belladonnas once Corsac and Fennec take out the house guards and weaken Ghira; temporary, because she’s still not sure of where she stands. Temporary, because what happened in the alley is a test, and she’s sure that Trifa and Gila won’t be able to hold Blake down long enough to transport her to Mistral. If she ever knew Blake at all, she knows that she’ll be here soon, guns blazing to protect her family. So here Ilia sits, waiting to assassinate the girl she once called her whole heart. 

Atop her precarious perch- _precarious,_ that’s more accurate, that’s the best description of this terrible limbo she’s stumbling through. Ilia feels like she’s swallowed the sun. There’s something scalding that swells and sinks in her chest like living light, encompassed by shadows so thick that she thinks nothing will ever be able to blot them out. What grates her nerves most of all is the idea that she can’t keep a leash on her heart enough to choke out the feelings that once drew breath and flickered with fire in Blake’s presence, feelings that are now encased in ice but still very much alive. What was once earnest is now bitter. What was once driven by passion is now pushed aside to make way for desperation. The taste of hope has decayed to desperation. But still, even now, the sight of amber eyes still makes her feel like a little girl again.  
  
And here she is, trying to extinguish their light.  
  
Ilia stares longingly up at the sky through the dusty window of grandeur that doesn’t belong to her. The shattered moon is a distorted thumbprint of pure white in the sea of shimmering velvet black. Winter has fallen across Menagerie in its frost-locked position at the bottom of the world, below - her heart shudders, constricts - always below, behind, too late. The spidery slant of the conifer’s shadows fall across the sheen of snow draped across Kuo Kuana. The world is incandescent with that strange sort of reflected light that bounces back from the dunes of white.

There are four things she lets herself dream of in fleeting moments, only in complete solitude and silence and dark, secrets so shameful that she would rather surrender to her own demise than expose them to light and truth. Such moments don’t come along often, but she’s sustained these visions because they were all that ever brought her selfish happiness amid her fruitless fight for equality: four things. A world where she doesn’t need to keep control of her colors, her gruff mother and gentle father smiling at her, the Faunus coexisting in genuine, easy peace, and this, the secret she buries so deep that even in privacy she’s reluctant to dig it up: Blake’s lips, soft and warm against her own.

 _Soldier._ __  
__  
_Coward._   
  
Maybe she’s neither. Maybe she’s just the kind of broken you don’t bother fixing.  
  
She’d be loathe to admit it, but she misses the old days, the old Fang. Ghira’s White Fang, not Sienna’s and now Adam’s. Back when it was three of them, a fourteen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old. Blake’s triangular mask, Adam’s ferocious white swirled with scarle, hers with horns and stripes. The justice-bound trio. Those days were sorrow followed by thrilling excitement followed by jealously so tangible it almost used its cruel claws to extinguish her will to press on to tomorrow. Nobody knows what she’s been through; nobody knows the way she’s come. A myriad of yesterdays ago, she was the one who had to stand there every day and keep her eyes straight and check her poise while perfect Blake stood inches away, hand-in-hand with her perfect partner. Ilia had to watch Blake fall in love while she herself fell apart.  
  
Once upon a world there was a gentler time, and she knows she has that phrase backward, but it’s true. Sometimes, the White Fang would be forced to pack up and flee when they got too close to the violent villages, back under Ghira’s rule, when he fought more for keeping the uneasy peace between his people and their oppressors than for their liberation. It always seemed to happen in the winter months, and even though Blake had the option of nesting in the warmer tents when they finally settled back down after their flight from hatred, she never did. She’d seek out Ilia where she shivered on the outskirts of the camp, bare arms silver with ice and involuntary efforts to blend in with the snow, and lead her back to where the bonfires burned. Slowly, the ice melted to memory, and Ilia turned from silver back to bronze. Blake guided her into shelter, and they sat amid the crates and the burlap and canvas flaps that doubled up as blankets, sharing their body heat amid the bitter cold. Sometimes the clouds would part and through the tent flap, you could see the blinding sunrays fracture off the sparkling snow, but in their pretend bubble of flames and comfort, Blake would brush her shoulder against Ilia’s and their ankles would knock together. On the better days, they would lean against each other to preserve body heat. Atlas, for all its beauty, was fucking freezing. But Ilia never minded the cold back then - it was always amusing to see the sheen of ebony fur on Blake’s ears bristle shock-straight as if she could stay warm that way, always made Ilia’s heart trip up a few beats when Blake would rest her head against her shoulder, a low, content noise humming in the back of her throat, like the buzz of a bee dipping from flower to flower. Her hand would loop lazy circles through the dust on the tent floor, the contact points of her skin against Ilia’s sending pulses of static warmth through her veins. And sometimes because it made her smile, Ilia would send little shockwaves of rainbow rippling across her arms, to where their shoulders met. It was in one of these times that Ilia realized she was in love with Blake, not with any great romance or overtures, but with a mild surprise, like the sun had come out sooner than she had expected.  
  
Below Ilia’s now-colorless arms, the door bangs open and the past rushes in.

She’ll admit that it takes her a moment to comprehend that Blake Belladonna is standing below her with her eyes like flashes of fire and her arms dusted with the cobwebbed remnants of Trifa’s trap, but she comprehends it pretty fast all the same. A moment and nothing more. 

“So,” Ilia manages. “You escaped from the docks, did you?”  
  
“You _bitch,”_ Blake snarls up at her. “You traitorous piece of scu- ”

“I’m not the traitor.” Ilia fights back a flinch. “How did you manage to outwit Trifa and Gila, Blake?”  
  
“That’s none of your concern.” Blake’s teeth are showing. She’s never looked so much like a furious panther, just like her father. “If anything is anymore besides blind treachery and blinder loyalty.”

“It was that boy, I would think,” Ilia snaps down to Blake, bitterness thick as the blood in her veins. If she ever loved, she wouldn’t know, because right about now, the sight of Blake sparks up more absolute hatred in her than she ever thought was possible. “That ignorant excuse of a Faunus. So you’ve finally learned the proper places to wager your faith, Blake. I wouldn’t call that a sure bet. Did he save you?” 

“I saved myself,” Blake declares. “I saved myself from _you.”_ __  
__  
Ilia narrows her eyes _._ “I’m not the danger here.”  
  
“Then we have to agree to disagree.”  
  
“As always. And we disagree on who needs to die tonight so that more can live free, Blake. Because your family will die.”  
  
Gambol Shroud is out and lying like a promise in Blake’s hand faster than the eye can follow. “So this is what the Fang has come to stand for,” she says, her voice strained with ragged grief and pain. “Ambushes and betrayal.”

“For our place in the world,” Ilia corrects. “No matter the cost. Don’t you remember that much, at least? You used to fight alongside me, Blake.”  
  
“I don’t know who you are anymore,” Blake hisses. “And I would _never_ fight on your side again, Ilia.”  
  
Ilia rises, coolly unsheathing her weapon in a fluid snap of the wrist, electric sparks dancing around its length. “That makes two of us.”

“You believe that these are the stepping-stones to reach the world you want?” Blake cries out. “How can you be so _stupid?”_ __  
  
“You think you can get to equality if you try hard enough,” Ilia snaps. “There’s no peace in persistence, Blake. The path you’re trying to walk _doesn’t exist._ Humans don’t understand restraint. They have only ever understood violence. _”_  
  
The air is crackling between them. Ilia releases the safety lever on her weapon, and Blake’s eyes narrow. “Is this what you want, Ilia? Because we can do this.”  
  
That’s the final straw for Ilia: she remembers her cheeks flooding with heat, Blake bound helpless at her feet, defiance exuding from every pore despite her position. Back in the darkened alley, it was some strange wraith that spoke through her mouth and forced out her confession and it’s the same wraith that consumes her now. 

_“I loved you,”_ she says, and it’s almost on a cry, her vision breaking up like ice floes, blurring and shimmering with a strange light, some bleak inversion of the aurora borealis. “Every single day I knew you, I loved you so much it hurt to breathe, and you abandoned me like it was the easiest thing in the world to do, and even after you broke our life in two, Blake, God help me, I still love you.”  
  
Blake’s not tied up and vulnerable now, but the selfsame defiance still cloaks her like a mantle. “You _love_ me, Ilia?” Blake’s eyes are strange, hard things, like bits of amber on a tree trunk, trapping and killing. “Very well. I believe you. Because you wouldn’t take any of the actions you have were it not in the name of love. Love for the Faunus, but you call the things you’ve done tonight love for me?” Her ears are pinned flat to her skull; her lip lifts with the barest hint of a feline’s snarl, a bruise slowly shadowing her cheek from her downward fall onto the concrete in the alleyway less than twenty minutes ago. “Love instills purity into the foulest of men and beasts, Ilia, but love has made a monster of you. Love isn’t something done to you as punishment. It’s a motivation that drives the actions you choose to take.” The unknown expression suddenly and violently transforms into a fury that’s alien on her face. “Do you imagine that you’re the only person on this planet who’s shackled and dying under the weight of unbearable love?”

Blind with tears of rage and loathing, Ilia hurls herself at Blake, but she is a hurricane, and she is ready for the onslaught. It’s like slamming face-first into a brick wall. Beneath that deceptive mask are capable muscles, cruel ones, and Blake’s fingers sink into Ilia’s shoulders and yank her bodily around, flinging her to the floor with a crack of wood and bone.

But Ilia is ready for that trick. She knows Blake’s way of fighting. She helped her mold it. She’s back on her feet and electricity crackles through her palms in one solitary whip of gold. At the drawing of her weapon, Blake opens fire, spitting flames towards her heart.  Ilia lifts her arm, deflects one swarm of bullets, rolls to avoid the whip, and feels a tsunami of dark blue overtake her skin, melding to the darkness around them; clothed in shadows, she advances on Blake.

“You think you hate me now?” Ilia snarls. “Think on weakness and blindness, Blake, and remember them! Remember for me now, because those are your legacies!”  
  
Blake’s elbow slams into her gut and throws her backward, and she slams Ilia’s shoulders into the ground in less than a second. Ilia draws breath to rise, but then it’s impossible, because Blake is on top of her and everything spins into shadow, then into light, dizzying and refocusing fast enough to turn the world to an out-of-control top.

And then, as Ilia struggles to get to her feet, her Aura down from the shock of it, Blake shoots her.  
  
It takes a moment for the pain to register, but when it does, it plows into her like an avalanche and it’s all she can do to remain on her feet. Ilia’s mask falls away to the ground; she sways. The world swims in a rainbow before Ilia’s eyes, an epicenter of pain beginning at her shoulder and radiating out, and she stumbles - oh God - she -  
  
Soundlessly, Ilia collapses.    
  
Time seems to dilate. All of a sudden, Blake is looming over her, her eyes enormous and shimmering and agonized. “ _Ilia -  
_

“Fighter,” Ilia whispers, agony trembling like an electric current through her veins, making everything shimmer with a bright halo around her. “The bullet. I didn’t think you—you had it in you.”

Blake lets out a soft hiss and makes as if to rise, and Ilia reaches out and seizes her wrist. “Stop. Don’t go, Blake, don’t leave me yet. Please… if I deserved anything—”  
  
Swimming in the eyes of her former best friend, her former world, and still the one she loves, is the frozen shadow of a little Faunus girl who trouped through the dust and litter brandishing a sign with a five-year-old’s messy scrawl of equality, heartbreakingly young. She never fell for Blake because of her courage. She fell for her hope. “I don’t know what you deserve for what you’ve done tonight.” Blake’s calloused hand closes over Ilia’s. “If not this.”  
  
“Still defiant, right?” Ilia shudders out a breath. “There are some things you need to know, Blake, please. Something terrible is coming, but you - don’t let me be hated now when I always was… please understand, Blake, I never wanted to hurt your family this way… I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. There is nothing I… if there was some way I could take it back, if there was anything I could do to go back in time and prevent the world from dividing this way and our lives splitting up the way they did and tell you and my people I’m sorry and I just… I just _can’t_ … ”  
  
“Not can’t.” Blake releases her hand and it drops sharply to the ground. “You won’t.”  
  
Ilia sucks in a sharp breath, laden with the swirls of gray-silver dust motes around them, a galaxy of ruin, tears streaking through the dirt and blood on her cheeks. “I… I know. The world is always the way it is. And I am the way I must be.” She takes a ragged, shuddering breath. “But I still ask you for one thing.”  
  
Blake is still, silent as the moment after thunder.  
  
“Forgive me,” Ilia breathes. “Because a day is drawing on quickly when forgiveness does not exist. The world is about to see war, Blake. But I cannot bear to see you standing on the wrong side.”  
  
And now, lightning in her eyes, darting back and forth, studying Ilia’s own. “For what, Ilia, do you beg forgiveness? For everything you’ve done? Do you really regret any of it?”  
  
“I regret the things that led us here,” Ilia chokes out. “But never the arms I bear to  exonerate our people. You can’t ask that of me. Blake, please, I’m begging you - ”    
  
“How can you possibly ask me for that redemption, Ilia?” Blake asks, an ache in her voice. “Do you think I can absolve you of something for which there can never be absolution? How could I ever give you that when you refused to show it to me, to my family?” Her amber eyes are agonized. “You held me suspended over a precipice of my life above and bottomless grief below, looked me straight in the eyes, and then let me fall. And yet…”  
  
Ilia waits, her breath still on her tongue. Echoing out through Blake’s soft words, there it is: her mantra, her belief. _You must choose tomorrow._ __  
  
“And yet you used to be my family,” Blake murmurs. “And yet, you used to be the shelter succeeding the storm. Someday, Ilia. Make amends. Call off this attack. Go your own way, and pioneer after your own soul. Someday, these paths will cross again. And then, maybe once you have done these, I can find something like forgiveness for you.” She rises up to her feet, and helplessly, Ilia stares up at her, unable to think of anything but how much a reverse this is from only twenty-three minutes ago. “There’s terrible things to come? We knew that already. Go and be a harbinger of Adam’s war. Ride in with the swords, and see the blood you’ve wrought. But don’t blame me for fighting for peace even though I’ve never known it. You’re fighting for a world that’s never existed, too.”  
  
Ilia hisses and clamps a hand to her shoulder; it meets a hot and slick wetness, the coppery stench of her own blood thick in her nose. Stumbling, slow, she manages to find solid ground on her feet, and to sway towards the door, Blake’s eyes drilling holes into her back all the while.  
  
“Goodbye,” Ilia whispers, not daring to turn around.  
  
Only when she is outside does she hear Blake’s returning call of farewell, rising and lilting into the dead of night, soaring up to the floating shards of the moon itself. Agony finding a new pattern in her blood, Ilia lets the light shut out behind her, and staggers out into Menagerie. A thin, paltry snow is falling outside, a flurrying pepper of gray dusting the ground like sugar, like ice. Ilia watches an icicle splinter and plummet from the eaves of this house she will never return to, pirouetting to the ground and burying itself into the white.  
  
Her blood stains the ground like the red lilies of Vacuo, spreading across the surface of a still lake, and now Ilia stands at the precipice of today and the black unknown, tethered only by the smallest shadow of amber eyes in the dark, and whispers back to the deaf night in the slimmest hope that somewhere, sometime, a pair of velvet ears and a knowing expression might resolve themselves out of the trees and look upon her one last time:  
  
“Forgive yourself.”


End file.
